Citing the Clinton campaign's efforts to tie Bill Ayers around Barack Obama's neck, biographer Carl Bernstein writes:
Precisely because she knows the destructive power of such assertions and how unfair they can be, she has sought for a quarter-century to hide and minimize her own activities, associations, student fascination, and personal history with the radical Left. Those associations -- logical, explicable, and (her acolytes have always maintained) even character-building in the context of the times -- are far more extensive than any radical past that has come to be known about Barack Obama....
At Yale law school she embraced some leftist causes she perhaps wishes she hadn't today (the Black Panthers' claim that they couldn't get a fair trial, more about which later); worked in the most important radical law firm of the day -- Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, in Oakland, which represented the Communist Party and defended the Panthers in their murder trials; and became associate editor of an alternative law review at Yale which ran stories and pictures depicting policemen as pigs and murderers....
"The reason she came to us," [firm head and former communist party member Bob] Treuhaft told me [the quotation is in my biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge] "the only reason I could think of, because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called "Movement law firm at the time. There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale" to intern at the firm. "She certainly... was in sympathy with all the Left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at the time."
Read the whole post here. Do I think this tells us anything surprising or significant about Hillary Clinton's politics today? Of course not. But something tells me that if these were associations from Obama's past, we'd be hearing a lot more about them, not least from the Clinton campaign.
(hat tip: Planker icarusr)
--Christopher Orr